Why Do We Rarely Read About Women in History Books
A Cursory History of the Beefiness Confronting Women Reading
Photo by Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/GettyImages.
This week, a 26-year-one-time American woman was awarded $3.five million to write a book of advice for young women. And a 16-year-old fan-fiction writer was mocked for striking a bargain to turn her 1 Direction fantasies into published reality. Also this calendar week, New Yorker writer Joan Acocella read author Belinda Jack's sweeping history of women'due south literacy, "A Woman Reader," and wrote all about it in one of the most respected magazines in the world. This could non have happened at whatsoever other bespeak in history.
For the first thousand years of the historical beef against women readers, as Jack'south volume documents, most women were barred from reading entirely, and the ban was a powerful tool in their subjugation. "In thinking near wisdom, it helps to read about wisdom—nigh Solomon or Socrates or whomever," Acocella writes. "Besides, goodness and happiness and love. To decide whether y'all have them, or want to brand the sacrifices necessary to go them, it is useful to read near them. Without such introspection, women seemed stupid; therefore, they were considered unfit for education; therefore, they weren't given an education; therefore they seemed stupid."
Once women were allowed to learn to read—as low-cal and leisure time and printed religious indoctrination spread, it became harder to keep them from it—social campaigns against women readers and writers mutated with the millennia, their justifications shifting to suit the era. After the fall of the Roman Empire, reading amidst both men and women was restricted to noble elites and religious figures, people with the time and privacy to selection up a book. Just when Charlemagne took over the Frankish empire in 800, he decreed that both men and women under his rule would be educated, though women yet read in the colloquial, while men were more than likely to be schooled in Latin. And and so the stigma against chick lit was born. Popular books written in words that women could understand were shunned by men as "sentimental and realistic" stories "nearly love and friendship and animals and magic potions," Acocella says. When women began writing themselves, female authors were oft accounted insane, or else secretly male.
Every bit the marketplace for words increasingly skewed female, men started trolling, claiming that women's novels were sexually corruptive, dangerously distracting, and hopelessly unrealistic, or fifty-fifty dissentious to women'southward mental health. (One 19th-century doctor, faced with a novel-reading woman, prescribed a book on apiculture instead.) Male authors adapted by publishing helpful communication for women targeted at keeping them in their place. Women—and the market place—fought back. As early every bit the sixteenth century, publishers began offer small, cheaper versions of books that could be easily hidden away from husbands. Book clubs formed, where women talked among themselves. "What was it that men feared about women'due south reading?" Acocella writes. "A big fear was that information technology was something they could do alone, without anyone to guide their thinking. They would learn to remember independently."
Nosotros all know how that shook out. Pocket novels and book clubs take given way to a bustling publishing market for chick-lit novels, where the voices of male person writers are not valued; countless fan-fiction boards, where women log on to draft their ain fantasies in their spare time; and social networking sites, where women—who regularly make upward over one-half of users—are empowered to certificate their lives in existent-time, 1 umbilicus-gazing status update at a time.
Only the fear of educated women—women who might learn to think for themselves—still persists in many parts of the world. This is why universities beyond Iran recently banned women from studying dozens of subjects, including English literature. This is why Afghan girls confront acrid attacks while walking to school. And this is why the Taliban targeted the 14-yr-old Malala Yousafzai, who penned a pseudonymous diary for the BBC, outset at age 11, where she detailed her struggle to be educated under terrorist rule. And so they shot her in the head. At present she'southward in the infirmary, not the classroom.
Fifty-fifty in countries similar the United States, where the lucrative marketplace for women readers is happily exploited, the stigma against women and books takes on new and exciting permutations. Female person authors similar Due south.Due east. Hinton, J.K. Rowling, and Curtis Sittenfeld (given name: Elizabeth) still truncate their names to appear more than masculine.
But why? Women today make up more than than half of the population, and 80 percent of the fiction marketplace, yet nosotros are yet considered a niche. The fact that ladies read is still somehow news, and whenever too many of us option upward one item book, like 50 Shades of Gray, commentators dissect the contents for clues equally to what women (all of them) are thinking. As Jessica Grose detailed in Slate earlier this month, books written past women—similar her own debut novel, Distressing Desk-bound Salad—are often instantly subjugated every bit "for-girls-only," marketed as something lesser-than, and so unfairly scrutinized. "[W]hy, for instance, was a series likeTwilight so much more critically derided than Stieg Larsson'due south Millennium trilogy? Both sets are huge all-time-sellers, and both are horribly written (unless y'all like elaborate, repetitive descriptions of sandwiches). But Larsson's were never painted equally embarrassing, pathetic props for bored housewives (or their husbands)," Grose wrote. "Larsson'southward weren't sneered at by the critical class the style that popular books in women specific genres tend to exist."
This seems to be just another iteration of that old fear: What specialized knowledge might women be arresting, solitary in their rooms? And, yes, sometimes the books we're reading do provide peeks into the social and political realities that women face today. But other times, we're just reading because we tin can. "A great virtue of Jack'due south book is that she repeatedly reminds united states of the internal pleasures of reading," Acocella writes. Information technology is "not then much the acquisition of ideas or data every bit but the pleasance of going to new places in i's mind."
Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/10/a-woman-reader-by-belinda-jack-women-s-books-have-always-been-marginalized-from-the-roman-empire-to-chick-lit.html
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